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Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why so many of these earlier GUIs didn't seem to have gotten typography right?

I remember Geoworks looking cool, but the typography was not great.

Even worse were Apple Mac inspired GUIs like Digital Research's GEM Desktop. (which was the default interface in Ventura Publisher)

https://winworldpc.com/product/gem/3x

Amiga Workbench despite being ahead of its time, had poor typography

https://theamigamuseum.com/amiga-kickstart-workbench-os/work...

Compare that to Apple System 6

https://winworldpc.com/product/mac-os-0-6/system-6x

The only environment that came close to having decent typography (apart from Windows and OS/2) was DesqviewX but I don't know if I knew anyone who ran it.

https://winworldpc.com/product/desqview/desqview-x-2x

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The GeoWorks typography engine was actually exceptional in that it offered fully scalable fonts (up to 792pt IIRC) when a lot of Windows fonts were still bitmapped and you had to get font cartridges for your LaserJet.

The fonts look a bit different from the Microsoft and Apple ones, but they were likely sourced from a different vendor (URW?), so there's an uncanny-valley aspect to it these days when "Times" means "Times New Roman".

I wonder if part of it was that when the earlier GUIs, like GEM and the Workbench, were architected before desktop publishing became the undeniable "killer app" for a GUI. They figured "here's some basic fonts to render the UI" and punted to the application software to handle anything else. Even with some of the early GUI word processors (GEM Write, for example), full WYSIWYG typography might have been above the expected target, considering the machine might be paired with a daisy-wheel or 9-pin dot-matrix printer.

Of course, all typography of the era looks a little odd by modern standards, running on a 640x480 screen with no antialiasing.

The first GUI OS to include a scalable font manager with antialiasing as a standard feature was Acorn RISC OS 2, in 1989.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS

(This was also the OS with the first icon-based taskbar, before NeXTstep and its Dock; and also the first GUI where dragging a window to move it moved the window contents, not just a dotted outline. It's the original inspiration for the Windows 95 taskbar.)

There are a couple of pics of v2 here:

https://www.houseofmabel.com/personal/computers/riscos/

And a gallery of RISC OS 3:

http://toastytech.com/guis/riscos.html

It was dropped in 3.0 but earlier Windows versions had a sort-of icon bar for apps. https://www.makeuseof.com/history-windows-taskbar/

I have read that claim before.

I deployed and supported Windows 2.01 in production. IMHO, it's not really anything like a taskbar, though. It looks a bit like it if you only know Win2 from screenshots, but if you used it, it's not.

It's just an area of the desktop. Windows minimize to icons on the desktop. (The only icons on the desktop.) They zoom down into icons at the bottom of the screen, that's all. If you manage to keep Win2 running long enough to fill the bottom row, it starts a 2nd row above it. You can, if I recall, also pick them up and move them if you so wish.

In a tiny echo of the tiling windows in Windows 1.x, normal-sized windows avoid covering up that bottom area, but if you minimise all windows you can see: it's not a strip or bar or anything. It's not contained in any way. It's not a special region and nothing else goes there simply because Win2.x doesn't put anything else on the desktop itself.

NeXTSTEP was first shown in 1988, before RISC OS 2. I never used Arthur but it was a lot more primitive IIRC. Even the icon bar in RISC OS is less sophisticated than NeXT’s Dock.

It was, but the NeXTstep beta 0.8 was after Arthur 1.20, and the icon bar concept was in Arthur. RO's version is less sophisticated, yes, I agree. Highly functional, though.

I moderated a talk and discussion by the surviving members of the original RISC OS core team a couple of years ago. I wrote it up here:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/

You can watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_SDL0IwbCc

The claim is from the team lead, Paul Fellows. To paraphrase him: One of the programmers got a job with NeXT, quit, went to California, and took his Archimedes. Lo, the next beta of NeXTstep had an icon bar!

I’ll give it a watch. I had the unusual experience of using RISC OS and NeXTSTEP at roughly the same time from 1991-1996. Until 1996 the only machine I really had that was my own was an Amstrad CPC 464 which had various add-ons and eventually an extra 3.5 inch disk drive attached which made transferring files much easier. For a while I had a cheap MS-DOS luggable and used a serial cable to transfer small text files from the CPC to the Toshiba T1000, eventually getting a slow modem for the CPC.

Ah, I didn't realize that. PC/GEOS did in '89 or '90.

Yeah, PC/GEOS was built from the ground up to give that fully scalable "WYSIWYG" "Display Postscript" experience but the PC displays at the time weren't very good.

I remember learning about self-modifying assembly in the low level drawing code from JimDF.

System 6 pictured is from 1988, whereas AmigaOS pictured is from 1986.

AmigaOS 2 and 3 improved significantly in the fonts front. The system font "topaz" was redesigned for 2.0.

Even 1.3 (1987) came with the FF ("fastfonts") tool, introducing much faster font rendering as well as the ability to replace the system font with a better one.

System 6 isn’t substantially different from System 1 when it comes to type though, unless you install the Adobe Type Manager or TrueType extensions of course.

Because typography is _hard_ --- Dr. Donald E. Knuth thought he would write a typesetting system while on sabbatical --- 10 years later we had TeX.

Storage was also an issue --- back in the early days of personal computers, they took up so much space that I would often set up a networked CD-drive with the BitStream 500 font CD-ROM which fonts could then be copied from to be used.

Steve Jobs took a calligraphy class in college and thus knew a lot more about typography than typical techies. He insisted on insanely great typography on the Macintosh because of what he learned from that class.

Typography is hard and takes up a lot of cpu time. Even though AmigaOS had support for proportional fonts with bullet.library, I would still use Topaz, MicroKnight, p0t-n00dle or some other fixed 88 or 816 font for Workbench.

The example code for the Amiga with bullet.library seemed OK on the 8MHz cpu (7.xx MHz) and would be fast enough maybe with 1 bit plane, but when the Amiga is advertised as a colour computer people would complain why it's only 1bitplane, although the Amiga DTP program did that and in interlace as well.

Early 1980s Atari TOS/GEM had the windows aligned on 16 pixel boundaries (M68k word length) to make redrawing easier and faster, I don't know if early Macontish System 1.X had that as well to speed it up on 8Mhz M68K CPU.

> The only environment that came close to having decent typography (apart from Windows and OS/2) was DesqviewX but I don't know if I knew anyone who ran it.

DV/X included Adobe Type Manager as standard. ATM was initially a optional extra, and although very common on Classic MacOS it was rarely seen on Windows 3.x.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Type_Manager

Quarterdeck was proud of it because DOS windows under DV/X could be resized to smaller than the original console size -- this is in the era of 72dpi monitors, remember, when 640x480 was a common resolution -- but remain readable.

Because it is hard. Windows (10 and 11) still has problems.

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